Pair of new SF housing complexes display smart design

1of6The 420 apartments at 13-story 150 Van Ness (left) fill in neatly next to 100 Van Ness in the Civic Center area.Photo: Photos by Paul Kuroda / Special to The Chronicle

2of6Wade Machon, the community manager of 855 Brannan Apartments, shows off the complex’s open public space in the Showplace Square housing showcase.Photo: Photos by Paul Kuroda / Special to The Chronicle

3of6The new apartment complex at 855 Brannan St. at ground level, where metal facades are poised above a tall base of concrete and glass.Photo: David Baker Architects

4of6The 449-unit apartment complex at 855 Brannan has a variety of architectural coverings that include a wavy rain screen that appears to be zinc, though it actually is cement fiber-board.Photo: David Baker Architects

5of6The terra cotta skin of 150 Van Ness complex as seen from Polk Street to the north -- one of the detailed touches that help the large complex fit into its surroundings.Photo: John King / The Chronicle

6of6The view of 150 Van Ness along Hayes Street -- where recessed balconies and projecting glass bays help bring a manageable scale to the block-long apartment complex.Photo: John King / The Chronicle

For longtime Bay Area residents, one of the many jarring aspects of our turbulent economic boom is the frequency with which large voids in the landscape get filled by large blocks of new housing.

The spaces “in between” no longer are, so to speak.

That spatial disruption is what links two newly completed apartment complexes on the fringe of two very different areas, Civic Center and Showplace Square. One succeeds by plugging a hole. One enlivens what before was a grim terrain. But each, at first, is likely to make you wonder where you are.

The more ambitious of the two is 855 Brannan St., a six-story complex with 449 apartments that covers 4.3 acres. It was designed by David Baker Architects for Equity Residential.

It replaces a former freight depot that spent its final years as an exhibition hall at Eighth and Brannan streets, in a stretch of the city that for decades was a blur of warehouses, showrooms and parking lots. Now, Airbnb has its headquarters across the street and the Showplace Square design district has become a residential address.

Veronica Bustamante, a resident of the complex at 855 Brannan St., practices yoga in a public redwood infill at Showplace Square.

Photo: Paul Kuroda / Special to The Chronicle

Baker responded to the large site and low height limit by wrapping strong forms in varied skins. The long mass is split into three cubes connected along an alleyway at the back: The Brannan Street facades are silvery metal or rusted Cor-Ten steel, while along Eighth Street and the alley there’s a broad wave of gray cement board that could pass for zinc.

If the visuals add spice to a setting where nearby buildings are thick and bland, the ground-level spaces are what make 855 Brannan memorable.

The sidewalks are as much as 24 feet wide and come with spacious planters and permeable pavers that allow water to soak into the ground rather than run down a drain. A 40-foot-wide pedestrian passage to the alley, dubbed Decatur Way, is lined by live-work lofts with a long central trellis planted with vines that will shade the benches below.

There’s another public walk on the east edge of the site, this one amid succulents, that eventually will be bracketed by a city-sponsored affordable housing complex to be built on nearly an acre of land donated by Equity. The building also features tall glass storefronts between columns of rough board-formed concrete, a Baker signature.

Most surprising of all is the eastern courtyard — open to the public during daytime hours but tucked behind a fence and glass-topped door (look for the “PUBLIC OPEN SPACE” plaque). Inside there’s a grove of 18 mature redwood trees, accompanied by ferns and drought-tolerant plants as well as seating of various styles, including benches formed from a fallen tree-trunk.

In part, the spaces are a response to city planning requirements that large projects in this part of town include through-block access and publicly accessible space. But edicts don’t always translate to enticing landscapes, as antiseptic stretches of nearby Mission Bay show all too well.

The difference here is a generosity of tone in the design by Baker and the landscape architect, CMG. While the developer may not want the public to visit the Redwood grove — it’s like a snippet from the Sonoma foothills — Decatur Way already attracts residents and nearby workers looking for a snug but urbane space to sit down and relax, or pull out their laptop.

“We were trying to make it a ‘place,’ yeah,” said Baker, whose work ranges from rebuilt public housing in Oakland to a pair of luxury hotels in Healdsburg. “Nothing down here felt like that, because there was no reason not to turn your (building’s) back to the street.”

The urban design moves are more modest at 150 Van Ness, which fills the block of Hayes Street between Polk Street and Van Ness Avenue with 420 apartments in a 13-story building.

Solomon Cordwell Buenz is the architect, Emerald Fund the developer, and the project completes a trilogy by the team that has packed 1,000 apartments into a corridor that until recently served as an automobile thoroughfare. Even though City Hall and Civic Center lie directly to the north, this was a quickly forgotten no-man’s land.

A swimming pool fills in the open space between the Civic Center residential complexes at the 13-story 150 Van Ness and the sleek 100 Van Ness apartments converted from a drab tower.

Photo: Paul Kuroda / Special to The Chronicle

The transformation began with the conversion of the drab AAA tower at 100 Van Ness into a glassy residential aerie in 2015. One year later, 13-story The Civic filled a parking lot at the northwest corner of Polk and Hayes streets.

Now there are three.

This one’s essentially a thick bar clad in dappled, brown ceramic tiles, with a daunting length of 384 feet from east to west. To break things down, design architect Strachan Forgan of SCB includes vertical strips of projecting glass bays and inset balconies. Each element adds contrast, the former for rhythm and the latter for depth.

The closer you look, the more formulaic the newcomer feels, but it’s a confident transition from sleek 100 Van Ness to the neoclassical forms of Civic Center. There’s also enough color and rhythm to make 150 Van Ness a pleasure to walk by, unlike the backsides of institutional and cultural buildings on the other side of Van Ness.

In other words, a background building with a bit of spirit. And in a city that needs housing, it also helps that 120 of the new units in the trilogy are reserved for low-income residents.

As for another pressing issue, environmental sustainability, 855 Brannan received a LEED Platinum rating from the United States Green Building Council for touches that include the reuse of structural redwood from the demolished freight depot.

Downtown towers are what stir wide debate, to be sure. But projects like these leave a deeper cumulative mark on the city. And to the extent that they couple smart design with genuine attention to the public realm, the long-term benefits are real — no matter how jarring they seem at first sight.

John King is The San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic, taking stock of everything from Salesforce Tower to public spaces and homeless navigation centers. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of two books on San Francisco architecture, King joined The Chronicle in 1992 and covered City Hall before creating his current post in 2001. He spent the spring of 2018 as a Mellon Fellow in Urban Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.